Your Opinion About Dave Is Not Your Own

Perhaps the easiest way to happily plunge into the surveillance state is to embrace the comforting notion that your mind is not your own, because if you're just along for the ride, then there's no reason to care what anyone (or anything) knows about you-- your deepest darkest most private thoughts are formed by the circumstances surrounding you, and thus there's no escaping them, nor are you responsible for them; Jonah Berger explores this wonderful new way to think and live in our modern world in his book Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior . . . it's a fast, breezy read consisting of summaries of compelling studies and vivid anecdotes which complement the science-- you won't be able to put it down; Berger doesn't really get into the philosophical implications of these ideas, he simply wants you to note them and understand the cliché: everyone thinks these forces affect other people, but no one thinks that they ever fall prey to them, but as you read, you'll slowly agree that your decisions are usually made so you can fit in, stand out, or achieve some desired combination of the two-- and competition, when it's close, may spur you on, and when you're being crushed, may destroy your soul . . . I learned that I'm more working-class than upper-middle-class with my automobile selections, as most upper-middle-class drivers try to select a car that's a little different from their peers-- they want to differentiate themselves, but working class folks don't mind some unity in their selection, and my family drives the two of the most common cars on the road (a Honda CRV and a Toyota Sienna minivan) for good reason, they are extremely reliable and well-rated, and they are easy to get fixed, because there are plenty of parts and all mechanics are familiar with them . . . but with music, I'm a typical hipster douchebag: I only like the early stuff . . . before they sold out, or else I'm listening to jazz . . . and then only this album, etcetera . . . anyway, there's also plenty of the research that indicates that where you are born has a major influence on your thoughts, decisions, and how much money you earn, and so there's no better program to help the poor than Moving to Opportunity, because it's not the money, it's the invisible social forces surrounding children that make them successful . . . anyway, I'm going to take this to heart, and stop getting all freaked out by Benjamen Walker's Surveillance State mini-series and just do whatever.

Some Smart Sci-Fi

Two recommendations for sci-fi lovers:

1) if you're overly worried about the surveillance state we live in . . . or if you're not worried at all about the surveillance state we live in, then take some time off from the screens and read Normal, the new Warren Ellis novel: it's short (148 pages) and fast-paced and vivid, a locked-room mystery set in a high-end asylum/refuge for depressed futurists broken by the digital age . . . and there are lots of bugs;

2) if you're overly worried about alien invasion . . . or not worried at all about alien invasion, then watch Arrival, where Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) truly get lost in translation; screenwriter Eric Heisserer takes a page out of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five: his heptapods see time all at once, like the Tralfamadorians, but this story doesn't have the surreal breezy irony of Vonnegut . . . it's paradoxical, cerebral and byzantine-- and done very realistically-- it's definitely not a thriller, and rather sad, but I loved it and so did my eleven year old son.

Send Lawyers, Guns, and Actors

The Supreme Court unanimously decided that an unloaded gun is still considered a "dangerous weapon" and possession of such during a theft means the crime is an armed robbery, but the possession of a toy gun is more ambiguous and I'd like to propose an amendment to the law: for a toy gun to be considered a dangerous weapon, the person who wields the gun needs to be an accomplished actor . . . if the criminal's acting ability is poor, then he should not be charged with armed robbery . . . but if Clint Eastwood waves a toy gun around, he should be considered armed and dangerous.

Poop and Food: Always Funny

We have a bizarre half-day extended-period schedule this week due to parent/teacher conferences (otherwise known as an insane waste of precious instructional time) and so I had to eat a snack during my Philosophy class to avoid being hangry; I took out my food while my students were watching the super-philosophical (and highly recommended) Erroll Morris documentary Fast Cheap and Out of Control . . . and just as I was about to pop a miniature cucumber smeared with Laughing Cow cheese into my mouth, Ray Mendez-- the naked mole rat specialist-- started graphically describing naked-mole rat bathroom habits, and every time I tried to take a bite, he said something disgusting and absurd-- and I was at my desk right next to the giant projection of the film while I was trying to eat my snack amidst this cascade of scatological imagery, and the students found it very funny; here is the transcript of what he says, and I should note that he says it with good-humored passion and fervor, he really loves these creatures:

They roll in their own feces: it's a way of making everybody smell the same. So it could be the subtle differences in the aroma that you carry around is enough to set you off against an enemy.

They don't urinate on each other. They urinate in the midden pile where all the feces are placed, and the individuals go there and roll in them. You'll see them kicking and rolling and shoving around in it and then turning around and going back into the nest system. They very rarely just go to the bathroom, turn around and leave.

When the young are weaned, they will literally beg for fecal matter so that they can eat it.

It's different than the hard pellets that you see the adults depositing when they're going to the bathroom; this stuff is much more undigested material.

Interesting concept to say: "Well, now I'm going to go to the bathroom, but I'm only going to expel partially digested food, so that some of the whole bacteria and protozoa that is in the fecal material, can be passed on as food."

[There's] a lot more Zen bowel movement going on than what you would normally imagine an animal having.

More Troubles with Detective Sean Duffy

Though Sean Duffy is as cool as they come (especially his eclectic musical taste) he isn't is as particular as James Bond about his alcohol: in fact he'll ingest most anything -- single malt scotch, pints of bitter, glasses of the black stuff, Vodka gimlets, enormous quantities of wine, cans of Bass . . . whatever, and he's not afraid to chase it with narcotics . . . stolen pharma grade cocaine, weed, codeine, or anything else that he runs across . . . sometimes this is to assuage physical pain, he often takes a beating, whether it's donning riot gear in Belfast, trying to keep some order as the lone Catholic in a Protestant housing project on Coronation Road in the town of Carrickfergus, discussing delicate matters with various Loyalist Protestant paramilitary groups in perpetual battle with the IRA, or getting officially roughed up by some American spooks for poking his nose where it doesn't belong . . . and sometimes he's drowning his troubles in drink and drugs to handle the mental anguish of being a "Fenian" peeler in the midst of the Troubles; in Adrian McKinty's new novel, Gun Street Girl, despite all this baggage the MI5 recognizes Duffy's talent and while his contact, Kate, remarks that "your house stinks of marijuana and Scotch, and there's what appears to be cocaine on the lapel of your dressing gown" she still wishes to enlist him in the British secret service, but then things get complicated . . . oddly, the wildest things in this novel are based on real events: a mysterious missile theft, MI5 agents lurking about Ireland in the 80's, a notable heroin overdose at Oxford, a Chinook helicopter crash, and connections to the Iran/Contra scandal . . . if you haven't read any of the McKinty's books, start with The Cold Cold Ground and make your way from there.

Would You Like Us to Assign Someone to Butter Your Muffin? Or Will You Go Shave Your Back Hair?

A corn muffin is just an excuse to eat some butter.

Birthday Cards! Not To Be Confused With Christmas Pants . . .

My wife and kids gave me several lovely cards for my birthday, but they paled in comparison to the cards I drew on Saturday night at Stacey's house: it didn't matter how cavalierly I bet, or if it was the flop, the turn, or the river . . . it was all birthday cards for me.

The Test 79: Time After Time (Travel)

This week's episode of The Test has got it all: Knight Rider, Quantum Leap, a Spanish lesson, and plenty of time travel . . . Stacey pithily summarizes the plot and you have to guess the time travel book or movie she's describing; treat yo' future self and give it a listen!

Little Miss Sunshine - Jokes = Logan

I will give credit where credit is due: New Yorker film reviewer Anthony Lane came up with the Logan/Little Miss Sunshine parallel-- although the connections are pretty obvious: Logan is a dysfunctional family road trip movie, complete with a grouchy dad, an irritable old man facing his imminent demise-- who even poses as Logan's grandfather-- and a mute kid who eventually finds a voice; when I asked Alex and Ian after the film if it reminded them of a comedy we had seen, they immediately made the connection . . . anyway, the important thing is that Logan is a dysfunctional family road trip movie without the jokes-- it's about decaying bodies in a decaying country, the difficulties and responsibilities of elder care, Alzheimer's and aging, death and decomposition, the awkwardness of meeting your young clone in female form and other hysterically entertaining topics; it is very dark and very grisly, and while I loved a couple of scenes-- especially Professor Xavier's seizure at the hotel and a mournful touch at the very end-- I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I can just drop the kids off at the movies and they can go live inside the darkness of the Marvel Universe on their own for a few hours, while I read a book outside in the sunshine.

Drama: Dave Style

It's always been a real struggle for me to memorize anything verbatim, and so when I watch any dramatic performance, I'm always impressed that actors can memorize so many lines-- and I learned something this week from one of my drama students that further inspired my appreciation for the mnemonic ability of the thespian; we were acting out the scene in Twelfth Night when Toby reads aloud Andrew's absurd challenge to Caesario and I remarked how it must be a nice break for the actor to get to read something, instead of having to rely on his memory, and this aforementioned drama student told me that actors have memorize the lines in a letter and the paper is blank (in fact, he said that during one performance where there was a reading of a letter, the other kids wrote filthy jokes on the prop piece of paper to screw with the actors) and this shocked me-- I figured this was a nice opportunity to not memorize something, but actors don't think this way, and so I told the class about the play I am going to write, it will require no memorization at all and consist entirely of reading things-- perhaps it will start with the protagonist getting a text on his phone and reading it to his friend, who will then read a text from his phone, and this will remind someone else of a favorite passage in a novel, which he will pick up and read, and then the mail will arrive and there will be a letter from the main character's ex-wife's lawyer, with some legal jargon that his friend will look up on Wikipedia, and read the entry aloud-- the drama kids are appalled by this premise, but I've got some of my fellow bad-memory compatriots to agree that it is a brilliant idea, the only requirement to be in the play is that you must be an excellent reader . . . so Tom Cruise, you need not apply.

Seuss + Dave = Birthdays

Seuss was a man
who created a cat,
with a number of tricks,
and a fancy top hat--
I am the man
who created this blog,
but I don't have a cat . . .
I prefer my black dog.

The Paradox of the Socks

Our household is now in the proud possession a teenager: Alex turned thirteen today . . . it's bizarre to have a child this old-- especially since he still looks like a little kid-- and equally bizarre that I am taking him and some of his friends to a rated R movie on Friday (Logan) instead of something more tame and typical, such as The Lego Batman movie-- but though Alex has entered puberty in a numerical sense, it's my younger son Ian (who is 11) who possesses all the hormones: lately, after he's done something athletic, his feet and socks smell to high heaven, while Alex's aren't offensive at all.

Tragedy con Carne

Let us all take a moment of silence to reflect on the good things in life and their inevitable passing into the great beyond . . . specifically, let us deeply mourn the tragic demise of a pot of exceptionally delicious chili, which my wife left to cool on the stove after we supped of it last night and then was forgotten, never placed into the refrigerator and so thusly spoiled (as we all will) and had to be thrown away, with great sadness and regret, the meat and beans uneaten, laden with bacteria, and destined to decay and return to dust in the landfill . . . o woe, o woe, o greatest of all woes: a wasted pot of chili!

Desert Blues

Tinawaren-- the Taureg band that hails from a Libyan refugee camp-- has a new album (Elwan) and Kurt Vile makes a guest appearance . . . while I can't comprehend the lyrics, that just adds to the atmosphere, and the guitar work is mesmerizing, hypnotic, and rhythmic-- a dash of Zeppelin, a bit of Black Keys, and a lot of something I've never heard before.

The Test 78: Finish It!

This week on The Test, Cunningham starts it and Stacey and I finish it . . . or we try our very best; despites some bizarre asides, we're fairly successful . . . so give it a shot and see if you can finish it as well as we do.

Can My Dog Read My Mind?

My dog does not like water, and he's never happy about getting a bath-- and he has an uncanny sense of when I'm going to give him one; normally, he loves to go for a walk, and when you take the leash out and call his name, he comes rushing over and starts bouncing off the walls, but when I'm "tricking" him and pretending we're headed out for a walk, but we're really heading upstairs to the bathroom, he looks at me holding the leash and then slowly creeps into the room farthest from the stairs and lies down in a lifeless lump . . . then once I put the leash on him, he ever so slowly makes his way to the stairs-- like a dead man walking-- and he doesn't even glance at the front door, instead he grudgingly goes up the stairs and slouches into the bathroom-- and I'm not sure how he knows that it's bath time, perhaps he hears the word, or he hears me get towels out of the closet in Alex's room, but it's strange and perceptive and very funny; I need to take video next time it happens and post it up next to his typical behavior when you call him for a walk.

Fooling Around into the Future

Steven Johnson's book Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World is full of weird and wonderful facts that I will soon forget (e.g. the word checkmate is derived from the Persian terms shah and mat, which translate as king and defeat) but the tone and essential theme is something I will remember and enjoy: the future begins with how we play-- how we experiment with sound and taste and vision and games and fashion and public space-- and while there are detriments, of course, the cotton revolution and the ensuing development of the department store created the consumer fashion economy, but also drove Victorian women to kleptomania, as they were so enamoured with all the new wares on display . . . anyway, the book itself is a wonderland of the exotic and the diverse, because when there is new technology available, there is usually a Cambrian explosion (my metaphor) of diversity . . . two centuries ago, the West End of London hosted much more than conventional theatrical plays-- today you go there for content and quality of a particular format-- but in 1820 there were a plethora (that's right, El Guapo, a plethora) of formats: "there were plays and musicals, but there were also panoramas and magic-lantern ghost shows, and animated paintings populated by small robots-- and dozens of other permutations . . . the West End functioned as a grand carnival of illusion, with each attraction dependent on its own unique technology to pull of its tricks."

Recreational Athletics, Brinksmanship, and The Nuclear Option

An evening to go down in infamy: last night, I was coaching the grade 6-8 town basketball team-- both my kids play on the same team and my buddy John is the head coach, but he couldn't make it so I was in charge . . . and we were missing our two best players, and though we didn't have the personnel, I was trying my best to get the kids to run the overload offense against the 2-3 zone, but this South River team has some absolutely gigantic kids (and an awesome little point guard) so were taking a beating, and my son Ian -- a diminutive sixth grader-- was hacked while shooting by a giant 8th grader (the size difference at this age is nuts) and I gave the ref some lip because he didn't call a foul and he did not hesitate before issuing me a technical and Ian was holding his jammed fingers and crying, so I pointed this out to the referee and I guess he didn't like my tone because he gave me a double technical and said, "You're outta here!" which posed a problem, since I was the only coach-- and while I may have overreacted a little, I believe he overreacted a lot . . . but I followed the rules and watched the game from beside the bleachers-- luckily, a random dude that I play pick-up ball with happened to be there (we were both going to play over-30 pick-up after the game) so he took over, and I conveyed some substitutions through my friend John's wife; it must also be noted that the kids played like animals after I got ejected, and they mounted something of a comeback (though there was no way to beat a team with kids this enormous) and I'd also like to point out that I apologized to the ref after the game and explained that it was my son who was hacked and crying, his tiny sixth grade fingers swollen and jammed, and that in that moment I became more of a dad than a coach, and he said, "You were a little over the top" and I should have said, "So were you" but I took the high road and walked away and I'll be glad when it's soccer season because the field is larger and the referees can't hear me.

Praise, Criticize . . . Who Cares?

A fun Tversky and Kahneman finding that's easy to test on your own is the "regression to the mean" fallacy-- the super-duo of behavioral economics observed this and wrote a paper about fighter pilots, but it's also a great thesis for sporting events . . . here is the logic:

when you criticize someone after they commit a boneheaded mistake, they are likely to improve in their next attempt, but if you praise someone after a brilliant maneuver, they rarely repeat their excellence on the next try-- but this does not mean you should criticize everyone all the time . . . it's not the criticism or praise that causes the shift in performance, it's the regression to the mean . . . most of the time, people perform somewhere between excellence and boneheadedness-- especially if it's something in which they are fairly skilled, such as playing a sport or flying a plane, and so after a boneheaded error, there is a statistical likelihood to be an improvement-- a regression to the mean-- caused by math, not criticism, and after a brilliant performance, people are likely to regress back to their regular old average ways, so that it seems as if praising them actually had a deleterious effect . . . the takeaway is this: yell whatever you want at your kid's soccer match-- if you want to feel consequential, then criticize him, but if you want to have a pleasant time, then praise him-- because neither action has much consequence (especially if it's soccer, because your son or daughter probably can't hear you anyway).

The Simon and Garfunkel of Behavioral Economics

I'm probably constructing an illogical metaphor here-- perhaps Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are more like Sonny and Cher or Sam and Dave-- but my "representativeness" heuristic immediately latched on to Simon and Garfunkel because of the lopsided nature of the duo; the odd thing about Tversky and Kahneman's symbiotic academic relationship is that both members spent some time in the spotlight . . . both members got a turn at being Paul Simon; at the start of their astoundingly fruitful collaborations, everyone doted on Tversky and no one knew Kahneman's name, and now --ironically and tragically, because of Tversky's death from cancer in 1996-- Kahneman is the famous one (I highly recommend his book Thinking Fast and Slow) and Tversky is forgotten; if you love Moneyball and The Blind Side, then at least read the first chapter of this book-- Lewis addresses the fact that Richard Thaler, another behavioral economist, had one criticism about Moneyball: it didn't address why professional baseball overvalued sluggers . . . and Thaler suggested that for the answers, all you had to do was look back to a wacky duo of Israeli psychologists and their experiments and papers . . . the first chapter of The Undoing Project tells the story of Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, and how he tries to overcome the irrationality of the human mind-- loss aversion and the influence of narratives and regret over decision making-- and while there is plenty of psychology and descriptions of experimentation in the rest of the book, it's also heavily concerned with the weird, wonderful, sometimes strained and awkward relationship between these two geniuses.